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Substantive short articles on Marxian sociology

Who Teaches Politics Now? Universities, YouTube, and the Making of Common Sense

As unions, parties, and public institutions retreat from political education, platforms like YouTube increasingly colonize the space they leave behind. Individualistic explanations circulate widely and effortlessly, carried by algorithms designed to turn attention, outrage, and certainty into profit. Over time, inequality comes to be understood as the outcome of personal choices, while success reads as evidence of merit. Structural explanations, by contrast, are recast as ideological, excessive, or out of touch with ordinary life.

By |May 13, 2026|
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Rethinking Radicalization: American Parties and Movements in the 1960s and 1970s

Ultimately, this comparison problematizes the assumption that radicalization is inherently destructive and incompatible with American party politics. Hegemonic parties with robust resources can nurture radicals and substantively integrate their ideas, avoiding the process of dilution that is characteristic of the Democrats’ listless interest-group configuration.

By |May 6, 2026|
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Trump and Netanyahu’s Lurch into Iran: Imperial Hubris in the Wake of a People’s Uprising

Reeking of Imperial Hubris Seizing upon what they consider to be a generational opportunity, with Iran’s theocratic dictatorship shaken by the January people’s uprising, Trump and Netanyahu launched a “prolonged” attack from the air on February 28. While the attacks are aimed, they say, at eliminating Iran’s nuclear and [...]

By |Mar 3, 2026|
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Egypt’s Failed Democratic Transition: Why the Labour Movement Matters

A central lesson is that labour movements will be in a better position to shape political outcomes decisively if they build independent organisations with real strategic capacity. The absence of such organisational strength in Egypt was a key reason why the post-Mubarak order did not evolve in a more democratic direction.

By |Feb 3, 2026|
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Owning the Libs, One Survey at a Time: On the Attitudes of American Socialists

The evidence presented above suggests that not only do socialist identifiers differ significantly in their social and political beliefs from non-socialist identifiers in general, but they also differ significantly from those conventionally acknowledged as the beginning and end of the American ideological left: liberals.

By , |Nov 17, 2025|
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Women and Class Struggle: A Marxist Study of Pakistan’s Trade Union and Women’s Movements

In my book Women and Class Struggle (English translation forthcoming December 2025), I explore the historical, social, and class-based connections between Pakistan’s trade union movement and women’s rights activism. At first glance, these two areas may appear separate: trade unions are largely male-dominated, while women’s movements, often led by [...]

By |Nov 7, 2025|
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Workers’ Political Consciousness in Demobilized Class Societies: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation

How are we to understand working-class consciousness under current conditions? We argue that in this conjuncture, the dominant form of workers’ consciousness is a moral sense of injustice, a protest against violations of an implicit social contract. The reactive scandalization of broken promises and violated expectations, rather than systematic ideological edifices, dominate as a modus operandi of workers’ political consciousness today.

By , |Oct 8, 2025|
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Slush of Chicago: Winter Parking at the Cross-streets of Public-Private Predation

Meet John Biggs. On December 1, 2022, he awoke to discover his car gone. As a carpenter who keeps tools in the trunk, no wheels meant no work. No work meant no income. No income meant problems. Later Biggs would learn his car towed on [...]

By |Sep 11, 2025|
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Science, Marxism, and the Critique of Positivism

Today we face dire and escalating crises, not least of which is the looming climate threat. Following the French critic Gilles Dauvé, we can say the prospect of climate catastrophe poses not just a social crisis but a civilizational one. The peril of the climate crisis has been enhanced by [...]

By |Aug 13, 2025|
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Control, Sex and Monopoly – AI’s Reification of Social Interaction as Next Frontier for Capitalism

Late on a work night, after a few drinks, I just wanted to text my partner back before a good night’s sleep. It might have been the fun energy of my partner’s texts, or the drinks, but in either case I was motivated to playfully use the AI bot [...]

By |Jun 23, 2025|
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